Friday, December 12th, lauded short film director Nacho Vigalondo makes his feature debut with Time Crimes, a tense, unstoppable vision of science and natural law gone awry.
Hector (Karra Elejalde) is relaxing on a lawn chair outside of his new country home, surveying the nearby hillside through a pair of binoculars, when he catches sight of what appears to be a nude woman amidst the trees. Hiking up to investigate, he is attacked by a sinister figure whose head is wrapped in a grotesque, pink bandage. Fleeing in terror, he takes refuge in a laboratory atop the hill, where a lone attendant (director Nacho Vigalondo) ushers him in to a peculiar scientific contraption. He emerges what seems to be moments later, only to find that he has traveled back hours in time, setting in motion a brain-twisting, horrifying chain of events when he inadvertently runs into himself.
Drawing from the best traditions of classic science fiction and crime fiction, Timecrimes plays games with the genre and the audience, giving the protaganist a Russian-doll like shell of identities that are shed so often that Hector can be playing one of any number of whodunit archetypes at any given moment as he becomes increasingly more complicit in the complicated mess that he’s trying to fix.
Here’s the trailer:
